저자: KenGriffin/CastUniverse · 외국인
요약 보기
6월 CPI 0.4% 하락은 중동 휴전으로 인한 에너지 가격 급락(base effect)에 따른 것으로, 휴전 붕괴로 이미 되돌려지는 중이라 일시적이다. 근원 CPI 0%·연 2.6%도 주거비 둔화가 주된 원인이며 구조적 인플레는 해결되지 않았다. 파월(워시) 의장도 과도한 낙관을 경계했다. 금·은의 단기 급등은 실질금리 하락에 따른 일시적 가격 조정이다. 반면 중앙은행 금 매입과 은 공급 부족 등 구조적 수요는 유효하다. 7월 CPI·FOMC를 앞두고 호르무즈 리스크와 주거비를 주시해야 한다.
다듬은 글
8:30 a.m. Eastern Time. That's when it was published. And by 8:36, gold had already risen $90. Not because of a war, nor because of a decision by the central bank, but because of a single piece of data. A fact that all the major media outlets in the country decided to celebrate even before finishing reading it.
The headlines said that inflation had plummeted. The biggest monthly drop since April 2020, the COVID collapse. Consumer prices fell four tenths in June, when Wall Street had only expected one. The annual rate fell from 4.2% to 3.5%. All the financial networks broadcast the same banner within minutes.
Inflation is cooling down. Some media outlets went even further. A chief economist was quoted as saying, and I'll be almost exact, that June finally brought relief and that the worst is behind us. And gold and silver did exactly what is expected in the face of low inflation. They skyrocketed . Gold jumped from around $4,000 to over $4,090 in a matter of minutes.
Silver followed suit, gaining almost 3% and surpassing $59. The odds of a rate hike in September have fallen. The dollar weakened. Treasury bond yields have fallen from their highs. Every textbook mechanical response to a report of moderate inflation went exactly as planned. This is what almost no one told them in that first hour.
The man whose job it is to set interest rates in this country stood up 90 minutes later and said the opposite of what the headlines claimed. Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh, testifying before Congress that same morning, was asked directly if this figure changed anything. His response, almost verbatim: "There may be some who look at this morning's data and say, ' Mission accomplished.
Everything is going wonderfully .' That is not my opinion." Read that again. The Federal Reserve chairman , looking directly at the same figure that had driven gold up to $90, told Congress not to believe in the party the market was having. And I want to spend the next 20 minutes showing you exactly why he said that.
Because once they see what's really beneath that headline, they'll understand why smart money didn't take this as the green light that retail investors think it was . Let's start with what really happened in June. Because the mechanism matters more than the headline. In mid- June, the United States and Iran reached a temporary ceasefire.
This briefly reopened tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and crude oil, which had spiked violently during the spring because of that conflict, fell sharply. Gasoline prices fell by almost 10% in a single month. It's the biggest monthly drop in gasoline prices in years. The overall energy index , which includes petrol, heating fuel, electricity and natural gas, fell 5.7% in June.
The steepest energy decline since the pandemic collapse. And since energy has a real weight in the CPI basket, that category did almost all the work. The BLS said so in its own statement. The energy index was the biggest contributor to the monthly decline, more than offsetting the increases in housing and food.
Read that sentence carefully. Housing prices went up, food prices went up. The only reason the main figure fell is that this volatile, geopolitically driven category plummeted due to a temporary ceasefire. Now, here is the figure they hid. This is what almost no headline highlighted. Energy prices , even after that monthly drop of 5.7%, were still 15.7% higher compared to a year ago.
Gasoline, specifically, remained 26.7% more expensive year-on-year. 26%. That's not a market that has cooled down. It is a market that has soared so violently in the last 12 months that even a historic one-month collapse barely affected the year-on-year comparison. The drop in the headline was not deflation.
It was a base effect built entirely on a ceasefire that didn't even last a month. And here's the part that should genuinely concern anyone who considers this data to be something lasting. When this data was published on July 14, the ceasefire on which it was based had already begun to break down. Hostilities between the United States and Iran had reignited in the days leading up to this report.
Crude oil was already rising again. West Texas Intermediate is once again surpassing $80 a barrel, and Brent crude is nearing $87. The exact mechanism that reduced overall inflation in June, a temporary reopening of shipping in Hormuz, was being actively reversed in real time as the report celebrating it was published.
Do you see the trap here? The market applauded a figure that was already outdated at the time it was published. If oil remains near these renewed levels during July, that energy relief will be completely reversed, and the July CPI report, due on August 12, may look nothing like this. Would you build an investment thesis based on a number whose base began to crumble before the ink dried?
Because that is, in fact, what the algorithmic trading desks did for about 6 minutes on Tuesday morning . Now, let's talk about the part that really matters to the Fed, because the overall CPI has never been its preferred indicator. The core CPI, excluding food and energy, remained flat for the month at 0%.
The annual underlying rate moderated to 2.6%, down from 2.9% in May. On the surface, that looks genuinely encouraging, and I want to be fair to those figures because they are lower than expected and fell short of the 2.8% forecast. But notice where that softness really came from. Housing, the largest component of core inflation, which economists watch most closely because it moves slowly and reflects real structural cost pressures , rose by just one-tenth of a percentage point in June.
This is the smallest increase in housing since January 2021. On an annualized basis, housing is still trading at 3.3%, which is nowhere near the Fed's 2% target . It is slowing. It's not resolved. Food prices rose two-tenths of a percentage point for the second consecutive month. Grocery prices have risen by 2.7% over the past year.
Prices at restaurants rose by 3.4 %. None of those numbers scream victory. They're the kind of persistent, sticky increases that don't make a dramatic headline, but that every household in this country feels every week at the checkout. So, here's the honest picture , stripped of the celebration. We had one component, energy, collapse due to a geopolitical event that was already reversing by the time the report was published.
We had underlying inflation that eased modestly, driven mainly by a genuine slowdown in housing costs that has been brewing for months, not something that materialized overnight in June. And we had a Fed chairman who looked directly at that combination and told Congress in plain language, "Don't get complacent." Now , why do they care about this if they have physical gold or silver or are thinking of opening a position?
Because this whole episode is a live demonstration of the exact mechanism that has driven precious metals all year, and it's worth understanding precisely because it will be repeated again and again between now and the next Fed meeting on July 28 and 29. Gold and silver are priced in the short term according to real interest rates.
When inflation data comes in low, traders lower their expectations about how high the Fed should raise rates, real yields fall, and the opportunity cost of holding a non-yielding asset like gold falls with them. That's the entire $90 jump they saw Tuesday morning in a single sentence. It has almost nothing to do with anyone's opinion on the long-term purchasing power of the dollar and everything to do with a short-term futures price adjustment .
Compare that to what happens several layers below the daily chart. The People's Bank of China added nearly 15 tons of gold to its reserves in June. This is their twentieth consecutive month of purchases. It's their biggest single-month purchase since October 2023. And they did it during gold's worst quarterly decline in more than a decade.
Ask yourself, does it matter to a central bank managing a multi-billion dollar reserve portfolio over a ten-year horizon whether the US CPI beat expectations by two-tenths of a point on a Tuesday morning? Of course not. They are not operating with that data. They are making a strategic decision about what they want to maintain when the current monetary system is different from today's.
That is the distinction you should keep in mind. Short-term stock price action is shaken precisely by the type of one-off and reversible data that we have just analyzed. Long-term structural demand, the kind that comes from central banks, sovereign wealth funds, and anyone who thinks in terms of years rather than minutes, hasn't flinched.
Gold is still more than 25% below its all-time high in January, near $5,600. Silver is still more than 50% below its January peak, above $121. And yet, institutions with the longest time horizons in the world continued buying throughout that correction. Let me ask you something. If he had only been shown the fundamentals—six consecutive years of a structural silver deficit, a gold-silver ratio near 70 when the 50-year average is close to 60, a Federal Reserve chairman who just told Congress not to declare victory, 20 straight months of gold accumulation by central banks—would he have guessed that silver was more than halfway to its highs?
Or would he have assumed the opposite? That disconnect between the price of the stock and the underlying data is exactly where patient positioning is usually built . Because this is what actually happens next. This CPI data buys exactly one thing from the Fed . Flexibility to keep rates stable at the July 28 meeting, instead of being forced into an increase.
The market's valuation for that July decision was already low, with around a 20% probability of rising, and this data reduces it even further. But September is a completely different story. The probability of a rate hike in September fell from approximately 75% to levels close to 60% following this report.
That 's significant, but it's not zero, and it's nowhere near a market that believes the tightening cycle is over. The Fed still has a divided committee. The June dot chart showed precisely that division. And the next important data point the Fed is looking to, the PCE price index, not the CPI, comes at the end of this month, followed immediately by the FOMC decision.
From now until then, observe two things closely. Watch what happens to oil if tensions in Hormuz escalate, because that 's the mechanism that could generate a much hotter inflation report in July in exactly one month, and reverse all of Tuesday's relief in gold and silver. And look at the house. If housing costs, which have been gradually declining for months, stabilize or rebound, underlying inflation will no longer support the narrative that the market wants to believe.
And Chiaraviglio's warning is beginning to be seen less as a precaution and more as a premonition. Is this rally in gold and silver sustainable, or did the market simply jump ahead based on a single piece of data? Honestly, I don't think it's a question of one or the other. I believe that short-term price action is really fragile, based on data whose main driver was already reversing on the day it was published.
But the underlying structural issues—the shortage of physical silver, the accumulation of gold by central banks, a Fed that has yet to declare the end of the fight, a debt of more than 39 trillion that generates a trillion annually in interest alone—none of that changed on Tuesday morning. None of that.
If you're looking for that kind of in-depth analysis instead of clickbait headlines, be sure to subscribe , because separating the signal from the noise in this market is exactly what we do here every week. I really want to know what you think. Do you think this cooling of inflation is real, or do you think the July data, with Hormuz again in play, will shatter this narrative?
Leave your opinion in the comments. I read each and every one, and some of the most accurate predictions on this channel have come directly from that section. If this analysis helped you see beyond the headline today, please do me a favor and like it and send it to someone who is still celebrating that 0.4% without knowing what's underneath.
Because this is where I leave you. The headline told you that inflation is cooling down. The hidden fact told you that it cools down because of a ceasefire that was already breaking down when the report was published. Chairman Powell saw the same data that everyone was celebrating and told Congress directly: that is not my view.
When the entity that sets interest rates is more cautious than the market that has just risen based on its data, that gap deserves attention. We have the Fed's decision on July 28, the PCE report, and whatever happens in the Strait of Hormuz, all in the next 3 weeks. And I'll be here breaking down each of them as they happen. See you in the next video.
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